A World Without Globalization / Letter from Russia shows the cost of staying isolated

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 12, 1999

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S UNIONS and environmentalists toasted their victory in Seattle, with its vivid scenes of protest and tear gas, a small letter arrived from a far corner of the earth questioning what, exactly, they had won.

The "Letter from Vladivostok" appeared Tuesday in the Moscow Times, written by an American journalist who has lived in that decrepit Siberian seaport for three years and admits to having lost touch.

"In the Russian Far East, we are not oppressed by Big Macs and super-sized orders of french fries because there are no McDonald's franchises this side of Moscow, 10,000 kilometers away," wrote Russell Working, the editor of an English- language weekly.

"If anyone wanted to dress up in a ski mask and smash the windows at a Starbucks coffeehouse or a Nordstrom's store, he would embark on a disappointing rampage, because the companies do not exist here. Perhaps he could be convinced to settle for wrecking the new espresso machine at a downtown market selling cake, pickled fish, instant coffee, and coils of hog's gut stuffed with gristle and fat."

As it turns out, life in Vladivostok is rather grim, despite having followed the precepts of opponents of free trade and "globalization."

The city was closed off from world markets for decades. Foreigners were not allowed even to visit. Nearby Japan and South Korea became industrial giants, but Vladivostok stagnated. Even when Vladivostok opened in 1992, it had no legal system to allow markets to function, so gangsterism filled the void.

"Ships rust and sink in the harbor," writes Working. "Unpaid workers march in the thousands every year. And most vessels that bring foreign goods to port leave the harbor empty: Russian industry has all but collapsed.

"Despite deep-water ports and access to the forests and minerals of Siberia and the Far East, the region is on its knees," Working says. "There is no Boeing, no Microsoft, no Weyerhaeuser."

And no Garden of Eden. The Soviets dumped liquid radioactive waste in the sea, power plants still belch smoke, and everyone is so poor -- 40 percent survive on less than $36 a month -- that environmental cleanup is not a priority.

But food is. The American Red Cross is organizing $8.8 million in food aid to Siberia, where many people are trying to survive on less than half of what it takes to buy the most minimal diet.

Working finds it strange, "as an American abroad, to read of the protests that have erupted around the World Trade Organization in Seattle, a major trading center in the wealthiest nation in history. Friends in the Puget Sound area fire off e-mails describing mobs in the streets . . . excitement is everywhere, the 1960s-style outrage is palpable, and it is clear that the millennium will usher in a new people power that will change the world by abolishing -- well, what? Hamburgers? Child labor? Third World debt? Smokestacks? China? "Or is it just that the protesters want the WTO to eliminate badness in any form, at home and abroad, lest the engine of revolutions, the awakened masses, take to the streets dressed as turtles and stilt-walkers?"

Seattle could prove a turning point in more than half a century of trade liberalization -- the steady, round-by-round lifting of trade barriers begun after the Great Depression, when global trade imploded, followed, not coincidentally, by World War II.

Americans now bask in prosperity, outraged that Korea might sell too much cheap steel for our cars or China too many fleece pullovers for $14.99 at K-Mart, and that more than half a century of expanding global trade has not yet saved the dolphins or eliminated child labor in Bangladesh. But in Vladivostok, more than half a century of isolation has not done that either.